What is Truth?
Dear Reader,
‘What is truth?’, the judge asked, as he took a bowl of water to wash his hands of the whole affair. The accused was clearly innocent but the lynch mob before him, egged on by religious leaders, wasn’t going to let justice be done. There was no denying it, they wanted blood. A nod to the guards and the man was taken away, a flogging and a bloody end awaited.
The nature and source of truth is one of the most fundamental of questions that mankind has asked itself down the millennia. Falsity is seen as the root of all evil in many cultures. Famously in the Bible the ‘Fall’ of mankind is caused by Eve believing the lie of the serpent. In the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism the cosmic battle between Good and Evil is conducted between a deity who possesses Truth and his evil twin who possesses The Lie. In modern times purity of doctrine or ideology is seen as a marker of inclusion or exclusion in both religious and political cults. Truth is a foundational concept in human life and philosophy and in our western, post-modern world of fake news and disinformation we are living in a crisis of truth. Nobody knows what to believe, who to believe or even if there is any such thing as truth.
‘Post-modern world’ is the key phrase here, for it is the philosophy of post-modernism that has created this crisis. Post-modernism emerged first as a literary theory in the early to mid-twentieth century in European and American universities, but quickly spread its tentacles into a wide spread of academic disciplines –the social sciences, the humanities, economics, until today when it infects all academic discourse and research, even the empirical sciences. Post-modernism is sceptical of the rational view of the world that had emerged from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, which was itself built on the Christian understanding that the universe was organised on predictable and understandable laws. The fruit of understanding that the world is structured rationally is science, which demonstrated physical knowledge to be objective fact, just as the Christian faith had rooted morality and spirituality as objective truths. Post-modernism challenges these assumptions and claims that knowledge, values and identities are contingent upon circumstance such as history, culture and political structure. As such, for the post-modernist, the individual’s perspective and experience, created out of their own personal circumstance, is of greater validity than an objective ‘one-size-fits-all’, truth. For the post-modernist truth and knowledge are not ‘out there’, to be discovered and accepted, but dependent upon perception and ultimately not to be received but to be expressed – hence the term, ‘my truth’ has come into popular usage. Truth is as myriad as the sands of the seashore, as the stars in the heavens, as the people of the earth.
The collapse of truth has brought with it a collapse in common social values and order. People, being convinced of their own ‘truth’, attack the old norms of society such as marriage, family and gender on little more than the pre-text that it doesn’t feel right or work for them. Even the British Medical Association has accepted the position that sex and gender are divorced from each other and that a male with a beard and penis can ‘self-identify’ as a woman and receive medical treatment as such. When your medical clinicians are in denial of biological fact you know that truth has gone out of the window. Similarly, the creation of ‘protected categories of people’ against which it is possible to perform ‘hate crimes’, and that the ‘hate’ only has to be felt by the victim – or any other person - to be validated in law, completely overthrows the concept of equality under the law and that accusations have to be proven. The perception of the victim is declared to be truth, no argument needs to be put forward and no process of weighing and proving the accusation is required for this to be ‘proven.’ It is a return to McCarthyism or Star Chamber justice.
Marxist political thinking has thrived in the post-modern world and uses post-modern arguments in its theorising and activism. In true style, the Marxist argues that all science is to be understood in the light of its historic and cultural roots – if it is not developed from a pure ideological base it is invalid. Science as we know it is viewed as a product of bourgeois capitalism and therefore can be dismissed or re-interpreted to make it conform to current ideological trends. The result of this subjection of truth to ideology can be clearly seen in the attempts of Nazi scientists such as Jozef Mengele to categorise people into superior and inferior classes by race, or equally by Communist scientists such as Trofim Lysenko, whose application of Communist ideology to food production and dismissal of genetics as ‘bourgeois’ contributed to mass starvation in Russia in the 1930s. Even more died in the Communist famines than the Nazi death camps.
Post-modernism has two major criticisms that reveal that it is an invalid philosophical tool. First, by its own reference it is a product of a particular historical / cultural / social / political context; if post-modernism invalidates other ways of thinking on those criteria, it invalidates itself at the same time. One cannot undertake a post-modern critique of post-modernism without declaring it culturally and historically biased and deficient. Secondly, as a theory of criticism of other philosophies it cannot exist without those theories, it creates nothing of itself but merely feeds off and destroys that to which it is applied. It is a fruitless philosophy. So, if truth is not relative, is not merely a product of history, culture and experience, where is it to be found?
The man who stood before the unjust judge had made many claims about truth; that it could set you free, that it was strong enough to build your life upon, that his words were truth - even that he himself was ‘the truth.’ As he was led away his words seemed like so many hollow boasts, it looked like truth was a feeble thing, easily overwhelmed by threats of violence and angry passions. Three days later though and truth was vindicated as the condemned man, whipped, crucified and run through with a spear, emerged from his tomb into the cold pre-dawn day. For post-modernists objective truth is a mirage, partial and contingent upon context and circumstance. For Marxists truth is subjective, something to be bent to the higher purposes of ideology. For scientific empiricists truth is limited to the purely material, what can be weighed, measured and tested. But for Christians Truth is proven invincible and immortal. Truth is objective reality, resting ultimately in a person, Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead. Truth is found in God, creator and sustainer of the universe, ‘immortal, invisible, God only wise.’
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